Intel Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition Review

Intel’s latest processor series has arrived, and we’re looking to find out if it becomes the company’s greatest. Compared to Intel’s latest mainstream part, Haswell, IV-E avails a quad-channel memory controller, a far more robust PCIe configuration, and the only place to get six-core parts. Are there other perks to be found? Let’s find out.

System: Futuremark PCMark

Futuremark’s no stranger to most enthusiasts, as its benchmarking software has been considered a de facto standard for about as long as it’s been fun to benchmark. While its 3DMark software is undoubtedly the company’s most popular offering, PCMark is a great tool for summing up the performance of a PC with gaming being a minor focus rather than a major one.

Futuremark’s latest PCMark, 8, consists of five main test suites: Home, Creative, Work, Storage, and Applications. The goal of each is to show how a system will perform overall in a given scenario, and their titles sum up each respective goal nicely. The Applications suite consists of two sub-suites; one for Adobe’s Creative Suite (or Creative Cloud), and the other for Microsoft Office. Of all these suites, we run them all except for the Storage, as it’s not that relevant.

For fun, we also include the overall test results with PCMark 7 (just can’t bear to let it go!).

Intel’s Core i7-4770K dominates in all tests except for the one we all could have guessed a six-core would excel: Creative. Overall, it’s safe to say that for general computing purposes, all of the CPUs are going to suffice, but for when high performance is required, the 4770K gets the nod – unless you spend most of your time video encoding or 3D rendering.